The first person the Santa Fe shooter killed was a 16-year-old girl who had refused to go out with him, according to the victim’s mother. Most of the victims were women and girls, including an exchange student from Pakistan who was due to go home next month, and two teachers.

Since the shooter chickened out on his suicide plan, maybe some explanation for his actions will be forthcoming. But online and offline misogynists think they’ve already figured it out:

The misogynists are using these shootings to guilt trip women & change dating culture. Very disturbing. pic.twitter.com/QNw6etJfPV

It’s a mystery, Mark, but maybe I can explain. What Mark here describes as the “destabilization of the sexual marketplace” is what I call women’s freedom to function in society as a fully realized human beings.

Just a scant few generations ago, the Invisible Hand of the “sexual marketplace” grabbed women by the pussy like a metaphorical Trump and traded us between fathers, husbands and other male “protectors” like a commodity. If love, respect and companionship entered into the bargain, it was usually luck rather than the objective of the transaction.

Women disrupted that marketplace by claiming their own agency. The men who are “hard hit” by that need to examine why they have to rely on coercion to get laid. Or they could use their not-so-invisible hand to jerk off. Really, guys, this shouldn’t be our fucking problem.

WTeverlovingF. Destabilization of the sexual marketplace? What the heck does that even mean. A girl refused to date him because he had dated her friend so he killed her. This is toxic mens rights horseshit at work.

Did I hear on the news (I haven’t read anything about it in the papers) that he was running around in a black trenchcoat, like the Columbine shooters, but no one thought that was fishy? In 90 degree heat?

ETA: it might have been mentioned in the accounts in the papers but I haven’t read any of them.

It started off as well-meaning, but this is why the whole kids need to reach out to the loners thing that sprang up after the MSD shooting was a bad idea. Guys who think they’re entitled to date any woman they want and become homicidally angry when those bitches don’t obey have bigger problems than any one woman can solve unless she’s a psychiatrist.

@schrodingers_cat: Well, probably, but I have lousy aim. And an acquaintance who knows whereof he speaks tells me that because a cricket bat is slightly curved and flat edged getting “banged in the goolies” (his expression) hurts like nothing on Earth.

@schrodingers_cat: No, it’s a women’s duty to service any potentially angry man that wants her or any number of people get it — it’s not just her that’s in danger any more. This is terrorism. Apparently a return to the good old days as described in ancient myths: wisdom passed down from the ages.

It’s really not that difficult to raise thoughtful, decent, respectful males. I have three sons, adults 25, 29, 31, and they treat women as equals who are as smart and as capable and as loving as they are. They don’t have a chip on their shoulders and they don’t feel like society is holding them down and they don’t see women’s equality as any particular burden.

Misogyny is learned, racism is learned, prejudice is learned. We need to teach our chilldren to be fair, honest, kind, and that other people deserve to be respected and cared for. The problem lies with those who don’t know that and don’t teach it.

Although it is different, this makes me think of how many women felt like they could not support Hillary in public for fear of reactionary men. Wimmins and coloreds are risin’ up above their stations and the real menz better knock them back down!

More seriously, we need to be teaching our boys no woman is obligated to go out with them (or provide them sex) and if they do want more female companionship they need to improve who they are as people.

We can even put it in terms the libertarians can understand: “in the free market of romantic and sexual choice, men of similar socioeconomic and attractiveness status must compete for women based on different metrics, such as empathy, decency, and willingness to evenly share household chores. Men with higher scores on these metrics are more attractive to women, even to the point of attracting women of higher attractiveness and socioeconomic status than themselves. A man who improves his scores in these metrics will improve his competitiveness in the market.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that discussion of the destabilization of the sexual marketplace is going to be labeled misogynistic because they have no solutions that don’t involve punishing women.

I assume they aren’t proposing universal mental health care for these potential killers.

Four of the students were female and four of the students were male. We still don’t know the makeup of the class or the timeline. To try to blame the shooting on anything other than the murderer and his access to guns is baloney.

Just a scant few generations ago, the Invisible Hand of the “sexual marketplace” grabbed women by the pussy like a metaphorical Trump and traded us between fathers, husbands and other male “protectors” like a commodity. If love, respect and companionship entered into the bargain, it was usually luck rather than the objective of the transaction.

The notion that there were “good old days” when even loser bastards could get a woman is a myth.

Human society, even the most oppressive patriarchal societies, channelled and controlled sexuality. In small villages, if you didn’t build a house and buy some cattle, you weren’t getting a wife.

We’ve had the recent spectacle of the royal wedding. If you were a fourth or sixth son, and hadn’t died in infancy, you likely would get sent to the priesthood. Second and third sons would get sent to the army or navy, and marriage prospects were tied to the success of a military career.

This attempt to try to tie relationships to market models is sheer bullshit.

The greater, more horrible bullshit is any rationalization of this murderer, his motivations.

I wonder what the incels propose to do to meet the needs of their gay brothers? Surely there must be involuntarily celibate gay men who yearn for some companionship. Are young men under obligation to put out for gay incels for the sake of keeping the peace?

Ehh, nothing wrong with teaching how to turn someone down politely if possible or to turn it around to accept no for an answer. It’s actually kind of hard to learn for shy people, maybe everyone but I know shy. However even a rude refusal does not excuse murder.
Story I read said the girl made fun of him. The writer seemed to be against the murderer, in fact it sounded like it was the girls mom. Still it was easy to skip right over the point most people get turned down multiple times in our lives and don’t murder. We all tend to dig into a story looking for why but it’s important to remember that rejection is actually pretty common and yet murder is rare.
I did notice the black trench coat mentioned seeming to be a warning sign. On the one hand it does seem ominous on the other peoples fashion choice is pretty personal and a lot of murderers have worn perfectly ordinary clothes. We can’t shun a very long list or jump to too many conclusions. Even dad giving a son a shot gun isn’t nessesarily bad. People have been giving 12 year olds little rifles for a long time that didn’t go on to murder, just learned to hunt food…still too soon.

So men have trouble with their sexuality and go out and kill people and the blame belongs on…women?

Makes me recall a moment at my small college when a girl had been attacked so the women were all confined to their dorms. Another girl revolutionized my young mindset by asking why it wasn’t the men who were confined.

I wonder what the incels propose to do to meet the needs of their gay brothers? Surely there must be involuntarily celibate gay men who yearn for some companionship. Are young men under obligation to put out for gay incels for the sake of keeping the peace?

This is genius.

Incels, we await your response…

Funny – one would assume there are plenty of incels in other civilized countries. Why aren’t THEY going on shooting rampages…oh wait, that’s right…we have too many DOORS on our schools here in America. It certainly couldn’t be the widespread availability of guns or anything…

Libertarians feel that destabilizing markets is a good thing – unless it affects their ability to order women to serve as their possessions. Funny how setting up a disruptive “gig” economy is considered a good thing – unless it involves allowing a woman the right to reject their clumsy advances.

As these same people keep babbling about genetics as the sole determining factor for everything (ignoring environment), I’ll make a Bell Curve-type argument and say that these violent men shouldn’t reproduce. They’re either genetically predisposed to mass murder, or being taught that mass murder is acceptable. Either way, we don’t need them raising more children to carry on their anti-social ways.

I’d also say that calling the dating scene a “marketplace” shows a fundamental personality disorder. Once one views all interactions with people that you’re attracted to as transactions as sex for money, rather than a source of mutual joy (and looking for someone with whom to raise a family), you’re viewing the world as populated by cynical manipulators rather than fellow humans.

The profile of Peterson in the NYT is an interesting read. He’s terribly worried about the rise of neo-Marxism but then supports the redistribution of sex. The writer has been accused by his fans of doing a hit piece but she pretty much let’s him spin out his weirdness with little critical commentary. Sadly there is too much of a market for Peterson’s BS.

Horrible. One thing that has been bothering me is the articles and headlines referring to the murdered woman as an “ex-girlfriend,” when apparently she never went out with him. So she’s his girlfriend because he wanted to go out with her? We really are talking about “enforced monogamy” here.

I’d also say that calling the dating scene a “marketplace” shows a fundamental personality disorder. Once one views all interactions with people that you’re attracted to as transactions as sex for money.

No, transactions of sex for money is prostitution. These dopes think that they are owed sex for free.

I seem to remember there were broken hearted boys and girls back when I was young in the 60’s. Girls had the option of saying no then too. Heartbreak is not a recent development, so there must be something else.

Steve Rose, a teacher at Santa Fe high school, ordered all the students to hide under their desks and crouched next to the door, waiting to jump on the shooter if he came in, student Kaylee Haaga said. Haaga said Rose told the students: “It’s my life before y’alls.”

She was not a woman, but a child. A teenager. With a long life in front of her. Who died because a lazy adult thought guns were toys, not tools, and because a boy wasn’t taught that he is not entitled to whatever he desires.

She was not a woman, but a child. A teenager. With a long life in front of her. Who died because a lazy adult thought guns were toys, not tools, and because a boy wasn’t taught that he is not entitled to whatever he desires.

Stepping back a bit, we don’t know what the murderer was taught, or what he believed.

And even though he was captured alive, he may lie or not even understand his own motivations.

“sexual market place“…wtf? I do my share of objectifying woman what the hell does that even mean, are these boneheads mistaking normal women for prostitutes, they think Playboy is some reality and not some cheesy male fantasy?

And as a side note, the Pakistani girl, I’ve noted that; these I-am-good-girl types from traditional societies oddly drive our home grown Sexists twats into a rage for some reason.

There are lots of non-alpha males who are married or partnered. Many are ordinary looking people with ordinary sorts of jobs. Not particularly successful or glamorous. Apparently these men encountered women, got to know them, cultivated shared interests and values, and formed successful relationships.

As I understand the term, the sexual marketplace is where you pay for sex and get it. That has nothing to do with the rejection of the shooter by one of the girls he killed.
Should turning violent be regarded as an understandable consequence of rejection? Is a woman at fault, even slightly, when a man she has rejected turns violent? Of course not. That is an MRA argument.

@debbie: In Texas, the shooter’s family isn’t liable at all. It’s a misdemeanor to allow a child UNDER 17 to access a loaded gun. This kid was 17, so the family cannot be charged. (Personally, I’d be okay with bulldozing their homes.)

Mark is totally right, y’all. I mean, there really is something wrong with our current sexual marketplace when women aren’t enthusiastically willing to fuck literally murderous men so they won’t go on shooting rampages. It is a real problem that the ladies aren’t attracted to these kinds of guys, and naturally and obviously that will lead to violence, unless women change their standards of what is attractive, and fuck any guy who wants to fuck them. Or, conversely, we, as a society, can just “enforce monogamy”, so all dudes gat laid by the supermodel of their choice, amirite?

I’m the mother of 2 boys, and frequently it feels like my entire goal is a mother must be to make sure these boys know that women are just as fully human as they are, and that a women’s needs and desires are just as important as theirs. You know, basic human decency and the ability to have empathy and compassion for other human beings.

Guns and entitled young men are the problem. I remember a famous case in India, where a guy doused a girl in kerosene and set her on fire because she refused to go out with him. He waited outside her exam center where she was taking her standard X board exams. So she was about 14 or 15
ETA: Without guns the killing spree would be limited. Guns just make killing easier.

Misogyny is learned, racism is learned, prejudice is learned. We need to teach our chilldren to be fair, honest, kind, and that other people deserve to be respected and cared for. The problem lies with those who don’t know that and don’t teach it.

Yup. And like Racism, LGB-Phobia etc., people need to understand that bigotry is the default setting in the US and if we are passive, our children will absorb it. We actually have to make an active effort to counter it. We need to have conversations about Race and Gender and make them understand how to be better. There’s a fallacy that racists are all raised by KKK parents. It’s not true. Simply being raised by people who would rather not talk about Racism, yields more racism. Same goes for this stuff.

The fact remains, for most all females in the world, they are treated exactly as property. India, being the worse example, followed by too many of Africa countries, and most Muslim countries that allow multiple wives (wonder why that is an issue? That’s right – biology! Ass wipes.) The human race is, and will remain a group of superstitious, racist and sexist with low intellectual abilities until enough education and social change occurs making most humans finally rid themselves of these primitive ideas. Even in the so-called first world, far too many people cling to their guns, religion and outdated sexist & racist beliefs despite education and economic progression. As the lyrics in the song say – “Men fear being laughed at by woman, and woman fear men will kill them.” This has to change not just in the third world but here, too. I, of course, accept that jackals here are a far more evolved social creature than most in the U.S. of amerika.

@charluckles: pretty sure the “sexual marketplace” is going strong…haven’t heard a thing about the collapse of prostitution.

Women choosing not to date someone because that person has no respect for them as a person IS a well functioning societal marketplace, ie there is no place in polite society for assholes that treat others like crap and or property…

@schrodingers_cat: Look at the male dominated birth level or the huge difference in male population vs. female – it is solely caused by aborting female fetus’s since woman have such low value. While China has a similar (through less, by percent) male/female population issue but it is caused more by a parasitic problem affecting fetuses. India also has massive problems of attacks on females for in sufficient dowry’s and burning with fire or acid. Remember, in India (and also Pakistan, which has many of India’s cultural traits) where village elders allow woman to be re-raped because they caused it them selves? The lists goes on. Some of these things occur in other countries but no country has so many and in such abundance. That is why I say this about India being #1 in issues for females.

I admire many aspects of Indian culture and even Hindu religious beliefs but the sexism issue is very serve. Gays are also rather poorly treated but that is another issue.

I’m to the point where I believe the families need to be held accountable. Not bulldozing their homes, but sizeable fines or prison times. And taking back their gun licenses.

In this case, the father allowed his kid access to his gun and the kid then used it to kill people. That means the father is not a Responsible Gun Owner. We need to use that phrase, one the gun humpers are always using, and make it mean what it should mean. Anyone whose gun is used by someone else to hurt or kill others is, by definition, not a Responsible Gun Owner. There need to be penalties.

In Texas, the shooter’s family isn’t liable at all. It’s a misdemeanor to allow a child UNDER 17 to access a loaded gun. This kid was 17, so the family cannot be charged. (Personally, I’d be okay with bulldozing their homes.)

And this is what needs to change. Access to the gun is one thing. If the gun is then used to hurt or kill other people, animals (other than hunting with a license), or property, then the person who owns the gun is Not a Responsible Gun Owner. If the gun owner cannot guarantee that his or her gun won’t be used for such things, then they need to lock it up in a gun safe that only they have access too, keep it offsite at a safer location, or not have the gun at all. A Responsible Gun Owner’s guns are not used in such a manner.

We don’t let drunk drivers get away with this shit. We don’t say they have “suffered enough” when they kill a family member. They are charged with driving under the influence and pay penalties for it. Same needs to happen with guns.

@Mike in DC: I mentioned Stepford Wives in an overnight thread. I read the book. Even as a lonely young dateless guy just past adolescence, I remember finding it bizarre that every single guy, without exception, was assumed to prefer the sexbot who also made great coffee and cleaned window blinds at 3 am. Over their living breathing wife.

@schrodingers_cat: I worry a great deal about India/Pakistan (atomic bombs, and boarder tensions) but not just the issue of how woman are treated. AGW will do more harm to those two countries (and Bangladesh) than anywhere at all in the world. In less than 60 years, most areas of that section of the world will become uninhabitable due to nightly temperatures above human endurance for many weeks at a time. That can’t be allowed to happen but I see no way, thanks to the people in the US from this unbelievable level of disaster from occurring. It is almost baked into all models.

Are we buying and selling in this sexual marketplace? So abhorrent to think that it is all the woman’s fault. Worse, are we to blame this 16 year girl old for rejecting advances from clearly a sociopath?

I take the liberty of pasting Ceci’s comment (#47) from Anne Laurie’s overnight Techno-Smut thread. There were also several follow-up comments.

Ceci n est pas mon nym
May 20, 2018 at 7:35 am
Dead thread?

I read the Stepford Wives novel years ago. The basic premise was that any guy would prefer an animatronic wife to a real one. And the way you spotted an animatronic “perfect” wife was always the same: they made really great coffee, they were apparently really enthusiastic about sex (never explicitly described), and they didn’t sleep but could be spotted cleaning the window blinds in their perfect homes at 3 am.

Even as a youngster barely out of adolescence I found this insulting to the men, the implication that those things were all that constituted the perfect relationship.

Am furiously thumbing through my imaginary copy of “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” to find what Adam Smith had to say about destabilization of sexual marketplaces. I’ll get back to you all when I have the answer.

Entitled men- and to be honest, it’s not just the young ones- are the biggest problem. The ones without guns to go on shooting sprees with still vote for Donald Trump and his ilk, which is a much bigger problem for the country as a whole. We can survive as a country with mass murders; we can’t survive when a large fraction of the country thinks the rest don’t deserve to be treated as equal partners in running the country.

@Snarkworth, short-fingered Bulgarian: Tried arguing that line with one of these assholes on another forum briefly. Basically his answer was always “no, you’re lying, the world doesn’t work that way”. Same deal with women trying to explain that no they wouldn’t drop their husband “in a heartbeat” if alpha male X (some movie star, I forget who) walked in their door. “Yes you would. You’re lying.”

What do you do with that? That’s basically the RWNJ form of argument to everything now.

@cain:
Have read his advances occurred for four months before she shut him down openly, in class. If only she’d endured just one more month, school would have been out. Or something.

16 YOs shouldn’t have to conflate social awkwardness with fear of bodily harm. But that’s what we have. Mine has school discussions all the time about which kids were likely to become spree killers. Maybe it seemed like sardonic humor at one time.

People like Elliott Rodgers are largely incapable of adapting their behavior to be more appealing. That is one reason telling them to change is unlikely to improve things. A lot of his ranting was considered unhinged even in the retrograde Internet spaces he hung out in. (“No wonder no one will go out with you” was said by more than one person.) The guy in Canada used to meow like a cat when a girl came close — no one would agree to be around that. So as for this latest shooting prompting calls for reinforcing declining patriarchal norms — fuck off. Even if you were in charge of your female relatives I bet you wouldn’t want them dating these guys either. It isn’t a woman’s responsibility to mold herself to appease maladapted or murderous men just because no one gives you the right to run interference anymore.

What Peterson is selling is right-wing nostalgia with a side of historical inaccuracy to dateless angry young men.

If I recall, it was even harder before the sexual revolution. You couldn’t date out of your own race, religion, social class, caste, or educational level. Unless you left town, you were stuck in one way or another. And parents and even religious figures had more of a say than they do now. If they said no, that was usually it. And don’t forget dowries and such. No money, no mate. And that wasn’t happening unless she/he also conformed to the above conventions as well. No Prince was marrying an actress, even if she brought a million of whatever currency to the table, along with 500 acres of land.

And if Peterson thinks that Prince Harry’s was a model of enforced monogamy, he needs to have a second look. In the old days, Harry would have been 10-15 years married to a daughter of some noble and already had about 3-4 kids. Freedom, thanks to the Sexual Revolution (among others), meant that Harry could make his own choice and wait for that choice.

As I understand the term, the sexual marketplace is where you pay for sex and get it. That has nothing to do with the rejection of the shooter by one of the girls he killed.

The “incels” seem to have two issues when they speak of “marketplace.” One is that they argue prostitution should be legal. The other is their belief that women of a given “value” (physical attractiveness it seems mostly) are now more commonly seeking men “above their level” thus “distorting the marketplace.” Those males of lower value have no options. Of course, this theory puts all the blame on female agency (with a more than whiff of dismissiveness toward that agency) and none on the men who possibly could do things to improve their “value.”

This is the latest Republican distraction from the obvious need outlaw dangerous toys. The other night I heard a couple of these dimwits discussing seriously how it’s all the fault of video games; and then for a bonus, it’s all because we don’t give guns to teachers; and it’s because that policeman at Parkland didn’t rush into the school to shoot the killer in the head (“all you need to do is shoot him in the head once”).

The hip new distraction is going to be that it’s all because the stuck up school girls refuse to service the mass murderers when they ask politely.

Next month the trending distraction will be all because kids don’t have summer jobs.

Same deal with women trying to explain that no they wouldn’t drop their husband “in a heartbeat” if alpha male X (some movie star, I forget who) walked in their door. “Yes you would. You’re lying.”

Projection. Stupid men have fantasies of dropping their girlfriends for a hotter model, if they could get away with it.

Often these dopes also have fucked up ideas about penis size.

Years ago, I briefly lurked in a Compuserve women’s forum. Despite long, nuanced threads about what women liked and disliked about men, inevitably some jerk would pop in and ask if women liked men with big dicks. And little has changed as the Internet has grown, but not matured.

There is “something else” happening here. “Closeted” “gamers” are hiding out in their basements, and seeking social connections online. In the course of that they are finding solace in toxic, mysoginist, violent forums. In these forums they are being “sold” toxic ideologies, by a mix of “true believers” and violent troll’s, ( the troll’s egg them on for shits and giggles).

There are pockets of the web filled with sociopathy and psycopathy, that the Social Media companies are loath to regulate or shut down, because they are highly profitable.

Like the Nazi’s, ( I don’t parse all the different flavour’s of Nazi’s. Drill down far enough in any “European Identity” social media profile, and you find Hitler memes, they are all Nazi’s, there is no alt-right.), there arn’t that many of them, world wide, but social media, trolls, bots and the fact they basically all “live life” on the web, and “hunt in packs”, makes it seem like there are a lot more of them.

99% of the kids are alright. 0.5% are sociopathic trolls engaged in stochastic terrorism for the lutz. 0.5% of the kids are messed up and are spending all their time in all the wrong places on the web.

Or, conversely, we, as a society, can just “enforce monogamy”, so all dudes gat laid by the supermodel of their choice, amirite?

That would seem to require polyandry (one woman married to multiple men), which would be the opposite of what these assholes want. They think that they should have exclusive rights to the body of any supermodel they fancy because they’re just that special, despite lacking anything that make them stand out from their peers.

The Santa Barbara murderer who is these guys’ hero was rich, upper-class, and not bad looking. What enraged him was that his terrible personality made women unwilling to date him even though he had everything the MRAs told him guaranteed him a woman.

I haven’t read the book in years, but it seemed more like all of the guys who felt that way flocked together into this one small town. The heroine’s husband was kind of like Rosemary’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby — he found a group of people who were willing to help his career as long as he went along with their plans.

I’ve noticed that in the past 15 years or so, a substantial number of white men under 30 have changed for the worse. There appears to be a great willingness to mooch off of parents, off of partners, off of partner parents, and an unwillingness to make the effort to either successfully parent or partner. We’re taking serious whiny ass titty baby stuff. And yeah, video games, maternal excusemaking, ridiculous entitlement and Walter Mittyism is part of it.

@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Although I realize how unserious this sounds, if you look at the average beer commercial it seems to be selling the idea of living in perpetual adolescence. Is it reflecting or shaping culture? I suspect the former, but I concur with you that this trend seems real and it is disturbing.

@Jay:
Back before the internet, of course, they got to form these cliques in person, with decent odds that they could inflict it on everyone around them, who had no recourse to even find out it was wrong.

There have always been men who don’t get sex (without going to prostitutes or having sex with with women they don’t want to have sex with). This isn’t some new thing. Even talking about a “sexual marketplace” is misogynist on its face, period. Only women (who are sex, somehow) are commodities in this “marketplace”. How many women in all age brackets haven’t had sex in a month? Two months? Six months? A year or more? MANY is the answer. These assholes, the “incels” and those who are advancing these bullshit theories, aren’t interested in pairing up lonely men with lonely women, they expect “hot” women to hand over the sex. With that I’m not saying that lonely women should have to pair up with incles, MRAs, and other psychopaths, no person should have to have sex or any relationship with anyone they don’t want to, obviously (I can’t believe we have to argue this!). I’m just pointing out that their “argument” is bullshit on its own terms. We are fighting involution in all sectors now: political, social, cultural, etc.

@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: AFAICT the biggest difference between being a sad white male loser today and being a sad white male loser 20, 30, 40 years ago is far greater access to p0rn. ETA You’d think this would _reduce_ the generalized sexual frustration in that population but it doesn’t seem to.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

After a horrific school shooting in Texas left ten dead on Friday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick sensibly proposed door reform as a possible solution for preventing future massacres, conveniently leaving out America’s addiction to guns from the equation.

Patrick continued in this mode on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning, framing America’s moral sickness as the root of the school-shooting epidemic, and firearm-toting teachers as part of the solution. An impassioned Patrick told George Stephanopoulos that “we cannot sit back and say ‘it’s the gun,’” exhorting Americans to “look inward at yourself at a nation” as they pray on Sunday.

Stephanopoulos countered that looking inward would reveal the fact that “guns are more available here, in greater numbers, in greater lethality than any other developed country in the world.”

Patrick agreed, but said said that guns are just part of the American fabric. “They are a part of who we are as a nation,” he said. “It is our Second Amendment — you know, it talks about a well-run militia…our teachers are part of that well-run militia.”

Patrick just leapfrogged everybody for first place on Pence’s VP selection list. Not to be outdone by some Texas cricker-cracker, Olly North, everyone!

New NRA president and populist hero Oliver North advanced this line of thinking in even more extreme fashion on Fox News on Sunday. He blamed a “culture of violence” for Friday’s shooting, and even more nonsensically, invoked ADHD drugs as a possible factor. “These young boys have been on Ritalin since they were in kindergarten,” he said.

I’m sure it’s just the result of stress from his concern for Melania’s well-being.

I saw somewhere — can’t remember, or I’d cite — that in his first tweet announcing her release from hospital he actually misspelled her name. Yes, he (or someone) fairly quickly changed “Melanie” to “Melania,” and yes, it might have been an autocorrect thing, but still. But still.

@Mnemosyne: It’s probably been 40 years for me, so I’m guessing your memory is fresher than mine. I see that the IMDB lists the film as a comedy and a parody, but I’m pretty sure the novel took itself seriously.

All I remember about the men’s group in the novel was that they were Disney employees so it was literally animatronics they were using. Slightly more advanced than the tourist grade I guess.

@patrick II: I can confess, that yeah, I was an Incel in the early eighties, but then again it never entered my mind to kill a woman who rejected, even when that rejection was strongly wrded and was hurt. Then again I didn’t have access to weapons and have a healthy respect for avoiding jails with a population of strong predators who had no problem of dealing with INCEL, if you know what I mean.

@Dman: As my husband said, this is pure projection, letting us know what Trump would do if he had law enforcement power. He cannot grasp that the FBI might have been trying to protect him from infiltration by foreign countries when it realized that Trump or his operatives knew about and were cooperating with the foreign countries. Oops.

AFAICT the biggest difference between being a sad white male loser today and being a sad white male loser 20, 30, 40 years ago is far greater access to p0rn. ETA You’d think this would _reduce_ the generalized sexual frustration in that population but it doesn’t seem to.

Back in HS a few short years ago (and even now, to some extent) I was never approached by many girls. I was shy and didn’t really try. Even then I still managed to get a date every once in a while and some girls were interested (just not ones I had interest in). Did I sometimes feel mad? Sure. Never once, however, did I think of killing anyone. I stopped worrying about it and realized love is something that often just happens out of the blue. Rejection is normal.

Men like Mark however care more about sex than having a meaningful relationship with a woman. The sex was never the driving force in anything I did.

It’s bullshit that this tragedy is being blamed on women and their right to choose.

@Mr Stagger Lee: And that’s one more thing I noticed about incel terrorism: it’s really self-defeating. Yes, you may kill the person who rejected you, but if you live,you will never have access to any woman ever again, even the “ugly Betty” types. And nobody will care.

Recently ran across a YouTube video about a successful male prostitute in Japan, with women clients.

A 20th century historical note that morbidly interests me is how around 1980 the idea that women might want sex and actively seek it disappeared from our society. The vast majority of people now would find the idea of women buying sex from men nonsensical, or pushing men for sex. Before then, the rich woman who maintains an (often paid) boy toy was at least as much an archtype as rich men keeping mistresses, and the guy’s complaint in Saturday Night Fever that women dance with him only because they want sex would be considered bizarre now. In the 80s, a huge wave of toxic masculinity hit, telling men that their success as cruel sexual hunters was the definition of their value, which in turn reduced women to targets without agency.

Which is unlike other forms of terrorism. At least they make a pretense of doing it for other people and causes so there is at least an attempt to try to understand and know. And often it’s something that can be fixed through political means. Nobody can fix what’s ailing incels and nobody wants to.

@Brachiator: Read a scientific paper some years ago but that does not change what India does. However, whether India is the most grievous (certainly with its huge population and the issues I cited it is either first or second if one does not believe my source) one must admit to an issue to change it and India has a long way to go. India, as the worlds largest democracy has far too much to address relative to female rights than most places. I points stand and what happens to woman world wide also stands. The issue is our backwards culture and evil practices enforced by religion. Sorry, I was away enjoying a short window of sun and blue sky. Been rare of late.

@pat: He was always wearing a trench coat. He also kept Nazi regalia on his trenchcoat. Here is a picture of the coat. I am sorry if that news site isn’t good. It’s just one of the few showing the whole coat.

Don’t know. Back in my day, the divisions were clique based, but different. My “group” would have been called “loners”, but we wern’t. You had to walk to school, gather at breaks and lunch, and walk home from school in groups, to minimize harassment.

We had a couple of girls in our group, dated later than “normal” on average, but all went on to having sucessful relationships.

While we had some weird ideas, from bad si-fi, racism and mysogengy wern’t part of it.

The MRA Groups formed around Divorce “support” groups and were often “supported” by Dominionist Churches and Troll Lawyers. Hugely different age group, who were limited in spreading their toxic filth around, until the intertubes arrived.

Read a scientific paper some years ago but that does not change what India does.

Again, not much point in singling out India or Pakistan. Violence and disrespect of women are world wide problems. America is supposedly advanced. But we have Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK. And Trump. Our fucking president is a sexual predator. Maybe we should start here.

sun and sky

It’s a great day here. I think I will get out, get some lunch, and enjoy it.

While we had some weird ideas, from bad si-fi, racism and mysogengy wern’t part of it.

The thing is, before the internet small, closed groups were the norm. You could get all kinds of social attitudes that dominated, but if abusers were on top, there was no recourse for anyone below. The internet hasn’t created these epistemically closed groups, it’s allowed those like yourself who didn’t grow up with them to see them, and their victims to find out they’re not alone.

Video games: they started back around 1985 for so. How come we didn’t have school shootings until almost 2000? Or mass shootings of any kind? And during the violent times of the 1980’s, minority parents would buy games to keep their kids off the street. I remember younger nieces and nephews spending hours on them. So why didn’t it happen earlier with minority kids?

Also the factors the no-gun control people cite were nothing new: bullying was certainly rampant in the 1960’s. I was bullied in grade and junior high. And so were others as well. So how come there weren’t school shootings then? Looking back, there were two things (maybe more). Nobody had access to those kinds of guns-you didn’t have the money, and your parents wouldn’t have had them in the house anyway. And parental units were lockboxes anyway: all you got was lunch and bus money. Anything else meant an ask, an d noway you were getting enough for an AR-15 even if you were rich. So people had to resort to coping skills instead of violence.

A 20th century historical note that morbidly interests me is how around 1980 the idea that women might want sex and actively seek it disappeared from our society.

Really? I don’t know. The idea that women might want sex has always fought with the fantasy that women were pure vessels above sex, who sometimes had to sacrifice themselves by yielding to the base desires of their husbands. Wifely duty and all that.

And the brief era of free love yielded into fear of feminists, whose great sin was that they were telling women that they didn’t even have to submit at all.

I also find it strange and amusing that in the 19th century some women went to doctors for manual stimulation to relieve hysterical stress. The vibrator was developed to make this easier. I wonder why more doctors didn’t just say, “you got sexual desires. Go home and have sex.”

I grew up with them. Why do you think we hated “The Mean Girls”, “The Jocks”, “The Rockers”?,

The “geeks, nerds and loners” were pretty much bully free, because there were so many bullies in the Real World outside “our” groups that had to be dealt with on a daily basis, that “we” didn’t tolerate bullies inside our little self defense clusters.

The internet allowed geeks, nerds and loners to become the online bullies they could never be in the real world.

In “my day”, only “tough guys” could be Nazi’s, or they had to go around in groups, to survive. No place for “Crying Nazi’s” as it was a real world, not a virtual one.

@Cermet: While there’s a lot to improve in India I’m inclined to think that some African ethnic groups/countries and some of MENA are probably “worse” in some sense. Also Afghanistan, particularly among traditonal Pashtun folks. In some traditional African societies women and girls are explicitly male property and their “job” is to grow the male lineage through reproduction. All this stuff everywhere is changing but it’s very very slow. Also, the most dramatic improvement in family health and wellness is education for girls and it scales–in a very poor country a girl getting a few years of primary school dramatically improves family health. In a contemporary industrial country, college or skilled training does the same.

@Jay: Good point, Jay. To be a Nazi meant you actually had to go to real Nazis and join up and suffer the consequences of being an open Nazi. What were they? Loss of friends, jobs. Maybe your parents who fought actual Nazis kicked you out of the house. Maybe you were expelled from school.
Also being a real life Nazi meant you had to do things that were illegal to fit in, so add jail time to the list of problems you would have to deal with.

If you haven’t read it, Jia Tolentino’s article The Rage of the Incels in the New Yorker is a very interesting look at the misogyny underlying the so-called movement.

Sexual value continues to accrue to abled over disabled, cis over trans, thin over fat, tall over short, white over nonwhite, rich over poor. There is an absurd mismatch in the way that straight men and women are taught to respond to these circumstances. Women are socialized from childhood to blame themselves if they feel undesirable, to believe that they will be unacceptable unless they spend time and money and mental effort being pretty and amenable and appealing to men….Men, like women, blame women if they feel undesirable.

I was on Swim Team, ( MVP), running back on the Football team, ran 800m and 1200m on the Track Team, Cross Country in spring.

I was also in the Advanced Sciences, ( Bio, Chem, Physics, Algebra) University Prep Courses, and took Arts Classes as well.

I didn’t fit anywhere but in my own little group, some were unatheletic, some were on the Industrial Arts track, some, Poetry and Liturature, they all were smart, shy, amazing people, once you got to know them.

I see that the IMDB lists the film as a comedy and a parody, but I’m pretty sure the novel took itself seriously.

The novel starts as a comedy of manners and changing social mores that ends up in a very, very dark place. I think re-reading it today would make Levin seem a little prophetic about where he saw white men heading.

Misogyny is learned, racism is learned, prejudice is learned. We need to teach our chilldren to be fair, honest, kind, and that other people deserve to be respected and cared for. The problem lies with those who don’t know that and don’t teach it.

I believe that a lot of people do know that and teach the opposite because they are assholes. Somewhere, sometime in their past they think someone denied them something they think they deserved, and they are going to get even with the world no matter what.

@Brachiator: Ah, but prostitution is exactly what the incels and their ilk think marriage is: sex on demand from the female in exchange for room and board supplied by the male. It’s sick – but it’s what they believe.

Are you kidding me? They are trying to guilt trip the victims in a mass school shooting?

What the hell does this mean anymore? How about if a girl refuses to date a guy, then decides to shoot him after she says no, because she is afraid that her life may be in danger from the guy? Does that sound like justifiable homicide? Sort of a pre-emptive strike I guess.

@arrieve: I’ve been wondering about how the rising desire to punish women coming from the ‘white men’s rights’ movement might go with the rise of the rw attempt to police and punish women for abortions (started at street-level, with support for vigilante violence, now risen to the political and legislative level).

Besides the deeper roots of policing and punishing women historically around the world, been thinking about the rise of moral policing in the US, Turkey, Iran, India and Pakistan to mention a few. On the increase.

Ironically, this is the old-time feminist view of marriage (we’re talking Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1790s). And at the time, she was pretty much right, because women didn’t have many other options to avoid starvation.

These guys want to bring back the really bad old days when divorce was impossible and husbands were the legal owners of all of the family’s assets, even if the wife earned them. Look up Caroline Norton in England, who managed to get one of the first pieces of feminist law passed with the Married Women’s Property Act in the 1830s.

@Brachiator: The idea that women neither want nor pursue s*x has popped up again recently. It puzzles me where it comes from, but I know where it leads — a woman who pursues s*x is “abnormal” and a “slut”. The WaPo had a story a few months ago about “pron literacy” in schools. Kids get a really mixed message from abstinence education and online pron, neither of which provide a very realistic view of healthy relationships and a lot of them just don’t have a good model to follow.

I’m a women who had a STEM career and my friends are mostly the same, we’ve noticed an increased feeling that we’re not as “womanly” as SAHMs and women who work in more traditional fields — from the girly girls themselves! It really seemed that things were getting better in the 70s and 80s and then it just stopped or even regressed.

Kids get a really mixed message from abstinence education and online pron, neither of which provide a very realistic view of healthy relationships and a lot of them just don’t have a good model to follow.

I’m a women who had a STEM career and my friends are mostly the same, we’ve noticed an increased feeling that we’re not as “womanly” as SAHMs and women who work in more traditional fields — from the girly girls themselves! It really seemed that things were getting better in the 70s and 80s and then it just stopped or even regressed.

This is sad. My commute used to include a bus which ran from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Caltech. It seemed to me that a lot of the women I saw, and sometimes spoke with, were more well adjusted than the men. And some of the women were so womanly and beautiful that they would have made me nervous if I weren’t a fairly confident old fart.

And of course, some of these women had double workloads, doing their jobs, going to school and taking care of families. Shit, if anything, I am in respectful awe of these women.

Also, I love the fact that Marie Curie had a hot affair with a younger scientist after her husband’s tragic death in an accident. And she won 2 Nobel prizes. Her daughter won one, also. Smart is womanly.

@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Throwin’ some pedantry in here, if you’re looking at the Nicole Kidman Stepford Wives (2004), it’s listed as a comedy because they screwed up their take on it so badly they repackaged it as a comedy. The Katharine Ross Stepford Wives (1975) is as dark & terrifying as you could wish. /end pedant

Ira Levin was a genius at imagining and writing horror stories that had more than a touch of real-world plausibility. I think he had a great understanding of how low some humans will go.

ETA really interesting comments on this post overall, thanks again guys for making this the best place on the internet to lurk.